Charles Carleton Coffin | Page 5

of
trousers, he strutted like a turkey cock and said, "I look just like a grand
sir." Children in those days often spoke of men advanced in years as
"grand sirs."
The boy was ten years old when President Andrew Jackson visited
Concord. Everybody went to see "Old Hickory." In the
yellow-bottomed chaise, paterfamilias Coffin took his boy Carleton and
his daughter Elvira, the former having four pence ha'penny to spend.
Federal currency was not plentiful in those days, and the people still
used the old nomenclature, of pounds, shillings, and pence, which was
Teutonic even before it was English or American. Rejoicing in his
orange, his stick of candy, and his supply of seed cakes, young
Carleton, from the window of the old North Meeting House, saw the
military parade and the hero of New Orleans. With thin features and
white hair, Jackson sat superbly on a white horse, bowing right and left
to the multitude. Martin Van Buren was one of the party.
Another event, long to be remembered by a child who had never before
been out late at night, was when, with a party of boys seven or eight in
number, he went a-spearing on Great Pond. In the calm darkness they
walked around the pond down the brook to the falls. With a bright
jack-light, made of pitch-pine-knots, everything seemed strange and
exciting to the boy who was making his first acquaintance of the
wilderness world by night. His brother Enoch speared an eel that
weighed four pounds, and a pickerel of the same weight. The party did
not get home till 2 A. M., but the expedition was a glorious one and
long talked over. The only sad feature in this rich experience was in his
mother's worrying while her youngest child was away.

This was in April. On the 20th of August, just after sunset, in the calm
summer night, little Carleton looked into his mother's eyes for the last
time, and saw the heaving breast gradually become still. It was the first
great sorrow of his life.
CHAPTER III.
THE DAYS OF HOMESPUN.
Carleton's memories of school-days have little perhaps that is
uncommon. He remembers the typical struggle between the teacher and
the big boy who, despite resistance, was soundly thrashed. Those were
the days of physical rather than moral argument, of punishment before
judicial inquiry. Once young Carleton had marked his face with a
pencil, making the scholars laugh. Called up by the man behind the
desk, and asked whether he had done it purposely, the frightened boy,
not knowing what to say, answered first yes, and then no. "Don't tell a
lie, sir," roared the master, and down came the blows upon the boy's
hands, while up came the sense of injustice and the longing for revenge.
The boy took his seat with tingling palms and a heart hot with the sense
of wrong, but no tears fell.
It was his father's rule that if the children were punished at school, they
should have the punishment repeated at home. This was the sentiment
of the time and the method of discipline believed to be best for
moulding boys and girls into law-abiding citizens. In the evening,
tender-hearted and with pain in his soul, but fearing to relax and let
down the bars to admit a herd of evils, the father doomed his son to
stay at home, ordering as a punishment the reading of the narrative of
Ananias and Sapphira.
From that hour throughout his life Carleton hated this particular
scripture. He had told no lie, he did not know what he had said, yet he
was old enough to feel the injustice of the punishment. It rankled in
memory for years. Temporarily he hated the teacher and the Bible, and
the episode diminished for awhile his respect for law and order.
The next ten years of Carleton's life may be told in his own words, as

follows:
"The year of 1830 may be taken as a general date for a new order of
social life. The years prior to that date were the days of homespun. I
remember the loom in the garret, the great and small spinning-wheels,
the warping bars, quill wheel, reels, swifts, and other rude mechanisms
for spinning and weaving. My eldest sister learned to spin and weave.
My second sister Mary and sister Elvira both could spin on the large
wheel, but did not learn to weave. I myself learned to twist yarn on the
large wheel, and was set to winding it into balls.
"The linen and the tow cloths were bleached on the grass in the orchard,
and it was my business to keep it sprinkled during the hot days, to take
it in at night and on rainy days, to prevent mildew. In those